Relfective Teaching

Frank D. Susi stresses the importance of using reflection as a tool to grow as an art teacher and to better lessons. Reflecting allows you to have a greater understanding of what took place and think about ways to change anything causing negative outcomes. Through reflection we learn a lot in our lives, like trial and error. When something doesn’t work we reflect on it, even if only for a few seconds, and to find out why it didn’t work and what we can do differently to make it work. Susi uses this process in the classroom to reflect on the teaching process and the student responses to find out what went well and what could go better.

Susi listed three different types of reflection: reflection-on-action, reflection-in-action, and reflection-for-action. Usually when I think of reflection it is reflection-on-action, thinking back to what already took place, but I think that reflection-in-action takes place a lot more than I notice, even while writing this it is taking place. Reflection-for-action combines both outcomes and is necessary for improving strategies.

I observed a teacher a year or two ago who taught art from grades one to five in an elementary school. What she found to be the most helpful in teaching was reflection and she constantly told me about the importance of good reflection. She always had every class planned out in detail but was ready to change any plan based on what was being observed at the time, or by reflection-in-action. Susi says that “Reflection involves looking back on experiences as a way to reconsider and better understand what happened”, which is something that should be happening constantly through our teaching experience.

Golomb 2 and 3

I found the most interesting idea in these two chapters to be the idea of play as a sort of coping mechanism.  On pages 107 and 108 Golomb talks about an 18-month-old boy who played both with a spool and in the mirror to cope with the disappearance of his mother. His mother’s leaving distressed him and caused him to have anxiety, which seems to be a common occurrence in children. Golomb explains “by playing games of disappearance and reappearance he mastered his anxiety and reassured himself that his mother would also return”. learning or knowing this coping strategy at this age seems like it would be very helpful in the future when anxiety like this would reappear if not already taken care of at a younger age.

Golomb revisits this idea in the section about play therapy, pages 129 through 131, in my opinion, when she talks about play helping children to “express some of his or her concerns”.  I think the whole idea of acting out a problem repeatedly to deal with the stress and anxiety it causes is extremely sophisticated and amazing to come naturally to children of such a young age. I never learned to do this for the separation anxiety specifically, I remember back to when I was 6 being filled with anxiety and convinced that my parents had died as that seemed the only logical reason for their tardiness.

Observation drawing with children chapters one and two

The idea that caught my eye and stayed with me the most was the idea of the three meanings found in an observational drawing. When ever I think of drawing as a narrative I immediately start to think of the typical comic strip. I want a narrative to have a beginning and an end, to tell a clear story.

According to the reading a narrative can be a single simple fame and can convey the same message which it goes on later to show with a great example which is a very common thing drawn by children. For some reason I've always believed narratives to be too complicated for children which the more I think about it is a ridiculous assumption. Since they were able to talk my nieces have told me stories, non-stop, seemingly endless stories about the most mundane things you could think of, and these stories are also shown in their drawings.

The meaning as a metaphor reminded me of the symbolic art drawn by younger children on a much more sophisticated level. The younger child's art may look like something crazy and incomprehensible but represent a very real thing, while the art in this book is a very real item that may represent something intangible, such as a baseball glove representing the love of a father. This is something that I have not seen very much of in children's art but more in the art of adolescents and usually high school students.
The last meaning, expressive, is something with which I have always struggled with. It is a style that amazes me, the idea that you can convey so much emotion through an image is amazing, but not something that I fully understand. Hopefully through this experience I will gain a greater understanding as to why everyone, at least in this culture, interprets a certain type of line to be angry, or playful, or sad.

Chapter One

The artistic development of children is amazing, even if only due to the difference between every child. Learning to walk is an amazing accomplishment, but once you've learned to walk, run, skip, and hop it stops, and its the same thing that most everyone else does. As long as there is effort put into it artistic ability never stops, it only slows down. To most children art is just a fun activity, its not homework or a useful skill, it is done so willingly and often causing their ability to grow and change with every picture. Golomb talks about the symbolism in early child art explaining a drawing of an object may look nothing like the object. The imagination that is necessary to create a symbol, such as a circle with three dots representing a face, is incredible and seems like something that is lost somewhere between childhood and adulthood.
through teaching, babysitting, and just general interaction with children I have noticed a large amount of overlapping and moving objects which I never thought much of until reading this chapter. Golomb explains the need that children have to show the full object which I am now recognizing now in adults as well. I know I personally still move objects both physically and only in the image to draw the entire thing or just a part that I find the most attractive.
I found this chapter to be very insightful and enjoyable to read and am very excited for Saturday art school to begin.